Genocide, Trauma, and Jewish Identity

Peter Beinart begins Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning—a provocative and incisive book about trauma and Jewish identity after October 7, 2023—with a note to an unnamed former friend whose fanaticism about Israel he’d come to view as unacceptable. The note reflects the painful divisions that have deepened within Jewish communities in the aftermath of Hamas’s horrific attack on Israel, and Israel’s subsequent, grotesque destruction of Gaza. In deeply felt, achingly personal terms that will surely resonate with millions of Jews in the United States and throughout the world, Beinart argues that far too many Jews are so committed to that with which they identify—the Israeli hostages, Israel, and Zionism itself—that they have somehow neglected, or even cavalierly dismissed, the lives and suffering of millions of Palestinians. His note concludes with a plea: “I hope the rupture is not final.” more